La importancia de los símbolos y la memoria histórica

When tracing a network, we attend to, and thus foreground, certain elements that are clearly involved in the processes of network stability; these are network presences. In this analysis, the presences in GMO networks of containment are those aspects specifically mentioned in

legislative documents such as the joint MAF/ERMA (2007b) standard Containment facilities for Plants or the conditions attached to an ERMA approval. 6-metre fences, air vents, training records, and controls to prevent the spread of pollen are not only involved in the construction of a containment facility, they are what anyone who is analysing the performance of a containment facility will focus on. Thus, an MPI inspector will examine the adequacy of training provision at a particular facility; similarly, a beekeeper may express concern about the effects of GM pollen on local honey production. These actions may lead to changes that involve the introduction of ever more elements into the network, re-making it as an increasingly complex and heterogeneous assemblage.

Beneath this surface layer of dense connection are successive layers of ever more complexity and heterogeneity. This is because the presences we attend to do not constitute elemental

foundations; “What is being made present always depends on what is also being made absent”

(Law, 2004, p. 83, emphasis in original; see also Law & Singleton, 2005). But network

representations provide no space for absence, and this has led to criticisms of early ANT studies (Star, 1991; Law & Singleton, 2005). There is also a rigidity to their structure that is necessary for stability. The sailing vessels that were the focus of Law’s (1986a) study of the Portuguese

expansion have been described as “immutable mobiles” (Latour, 1990): “mobile” because they are able to move in Euclidean space, but “immutable” because they remain unchanged in network space (Law, 2002b).

175 The evidence I have presented in this chapter suggests that the stability of the containment facility is dependent not on rigidity but on flexibility. A GMO can be grown in a laboratory or a field; it can be surrounded by different “sides”; and sometimes it can be in transit between different locations. The GMO nevertheless remains “in containment” in all these instances; but it does so only because the heterogeneous assemblage that enacts the containment facility is able to adapt and change.

Similarly, this stability is not the result of network presences alone: absences are also necessary, but they must remain absent from view. For example, the distinction between accompanied and unaccompanied persons does not feature in common understandings of the operation of a containment facility. Instead, we focus on the presence of scientists who we can “see” working in laboratories and fields and assume that all aspects of a GMO research programme are carried out by them. But there could be no research programme if refrigeration units weren’t maintained, lawns weren’t mowed, or even if the soap in a handwashing facility wasn’t refilled. These latter are manifest absences: they correlate with and result from presence (Law, 2004). We only become aware of them if they don’t fulfil their role in a network: if a cleaner fails to sterilise the water used to mop a laboratory floor or if a contractor puts design aesthetic ahead of

containment requirements.

The supervisors of containment facilities are directly responsible for managing material absences, making sure that they don’t rise to the surface but instead remain invisible. These supervisors are therefore heterogeneous engineers in a sense that extends beyond a network-based

interpretation of their role: they have to negotiate the “oscillation between absence and presence” (Law, 2002a, p. 96, emphasis in original) that is folded within an object. Nevertheless, these supervisors also remain absent from view, and this has significant implications for risk management practices. I will discuss this point in detail in Chapter 8.

But an attention to material absence cannot account for the full range of heterogeneity that enacts the containment facility. The data presented in this chapter indicates that there is something else that must be incorporated, something that is neither present, nor absent;

something that “simply does not fit” (Law & Singleton, 2005, p. 341). This “Otherness” is enacted as “irrelevant, impossible, or repressed” by network presences (Law, 2004, p. 157; see Chapter 3 for discussion). Nevertheless, alongside absence, Otherness is a necessary counterpart to presence (ibid.) and must also be kept in (or out of) place for an object to remain stable. Otherness is what spills over the boundaries of formal definitions and defies the structure and

176 control of not only Euclidean space, but also network space. But it is still “there”; and it is still part of what an object is.

The data I have presented in this chapter indicates that the stability of containment facilities is dependent on not only presence and material absence, but also Otherness. For a place to

function as a containment facility, we have to Other its existence as a workplace that is subject to Health and Safety requirements: thus Master Keys and the access they confer to unknown people do not enter into discussions over containment facility access, and there is no written record of their use. Anti-GMO spokespeople are assigned a role within formal decision-making processes, and while this gives them a voice at ERMA hearings, it also serves to restrict their influence on the outcome, Othering their objections to GMO research as a whole. Nevertheless, they find

alternative methods of acting against GMO research, including consumer boycotts and the

informal monitoring of field test sites. These activities have a significant effect on the outcomes of GMO research, such as the dismantling of research programmes directly and indirectly related to their activities. But this in turn has implications for the careers of GMO scientists, who appear to be choosing to stay within the confines of the laboratory because of the controversy that surrounds field-based research. Furthermore, the presence of this laboratory-based research is effaced from popular conceptions of GMO research in New Zealand, which proudly labels itself as “GE-Free”. But this research hasn’t “disappeared”; it has been “Othered”.

The role of Otherness in the establishment of stable categories has not been the traditional focus of attention for STS or ANT scholars (see Singleton, 1998). But recent literature has examined the role of instabilities in the continuity of laboratory work (ibid.), and this has been extended to more general considerations of how to incorporate Otherness into object representations. The “fire object” is neither rigid nor fluid, but is instead characterised by discontinuity, disjunction, and a dependence on difference (Law & Singleton, 2005). Law and Singleton (ibid.) illustrate their portrayal of the fire object through a consideration of alcoholic liver disease: they argue that this object folds together three different versions of the same disease, each enacted by different patterns of presence/absence that are irreconcilable with one another.

Similarly, in my research, the containment facility folds together two different places that appear to be completely different: the laboratory and the field. Each is enacted through a pattern of presence/absence, but these patterns are different for each type of facility. Thus we find that their characteristics are completely contradictory in that the laboratory is safe, private, and acceptable and the field is risky, public, and controversial. But these contradictions are not the result of separation but because they are connected “Others”. To paraphrase Law and Singleton:

177 “the pattern of absent presences over the [two] locations is itself a pattern of absent presence, of necessary otherness. [Laboratories and fields] are other to each other. They cannot be included in each other. At the same time (and this is the difficulty and the complication), they are also

necessarily related to one another because they are part of the same [risk management] system and interact with one another” (2005, p. 347, emphasis in original). Thus laboratories and fields depend on and feed off each other. This indicates that the safety, privacy, and acceptability of the laboratory are only afforded by the risk, publicity, and controversy of the field.

These observations have significant implications for current understandings of the “containment” of GMO research. They lead us to question what the boundaries of containment facilities are and how they are created. According to the HSNO act, containment is defined as “restricting an organism or substance to a secure location or facility to prevent escape” (1996, Part 1, section 2). This definition focuses on the construction of a discrete physical boundary, and the delineation of what lies “inside” and “outside” that boundary. When ERMA considers applications to conduct GMO research, it focuses on the boundary of a containment facility: it considers whether or not a GMO will remain “inside” a containment facility or if any part of it is likely to somehow “escape” into and establish itself in the world “outside”. This approach to containment is essentially aimed at maintaining the physical separation between inside and outside; to borrow from Mary Douglas, a containment breach is genetically altered “matter out of place" (1966, p. 36).

But this emphasis on boundary maintenance is an inaccurate definition of containment. My results demonstrate that containment is enacted by relations that transcend the physical and operational boundaries of containment facilities, folding together that which lies “inside” and “outside” the containment facility. Furthermore, the separation between laboratories and fields is also enacted through these practices, meaning that they are an outcome of them rather than a precursor to activity. These observations have further implications for the risk management of GMO research, which I will consider in detail in Chapter 8.

7.4 Summary and conclusions

In New Zealand, all programmes of GMO research are conducted in “containment facilities”. This chapter has tested the boundaries of containment facilities, exploring the practices that are involved in creating and controlling them. The results indicate that there is no single, fixed boundary to the containment facility; nor is it purely physical. Furthermore, this boundary is permeable: it must be crossed if the facility is to operate effectively. Some of these crossings are specified in legal definitions of containment; but others are not, even though they too are

178 necessary to the stability of this object. Finally I have shown that the world “outside” the

containment facility is also involved in enacting its boundaries.

These multiple overlapping narratives on the boundaries of containment facilities lead me to dispute the notion that GMO research is conducted in a physically enclosed and impenetrable “place”, whether a field or a laboratory. The boundaries of containment facilities do not enclose a physical location; they are enacted by a heterogeneous assemblage that folds together presence, absence and Otherness. While this object can be interpreted using ANT, it requires a different approach to the analysis of tearless onions. Instead of common Focus Points there are

discontinuities; instead of collaboration there is contradiction. Rather than try to efface these by smoothing out “anomalous” results, ANT directs us to embrace such ruptures in any

representation of the object. To do this requires a move beyond the networks of early ANT studies to consider increasingly varied topologies. My analysis shows that the “fire object” provides a means of representing the containment facility: characterised by discontinuity, disjunction, and a dependence on difference it encompasses not only presence and absence, but also that which has been Othered. Thus, apparently contradictory aspects of GMO research can be brought together under the banner of “containment”: risk and safety; public and private; controversy and acceptability. Each of these is a discontinuous pairing, an either/or choice; and yet they co-constitute the containment facility as an object, each responsible for making it what it is.

This analysis therefore disputes the notion that laboratories and fields are entirely distinct places of GMO research, arguing instead that their apparent separation is enacted by the relations that co-constitute them. These conclusions have implications for understandings of risk and the practice of risk management. In the Chapter 8 I will therefore discuss the topic of risk in more detail, using the results of all three analytical chapters to present a re-interpretation of the risks of GMO research as well as indicating possibilities for change. I will also discuss the theoretical and methodological findings of this study, using the lessons learned from the two different case studies presented in this thesis to provide a re-interpretation of ANT.

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Chapter 8

Discussion

8.1 Introduction

In this chapter I will discuss a number of cross-cutting themes and issues that have emerged in the course of this thesis. Thus far, the analytical discussions presented in Chapters 5, 6, and 7 have focused on the results presented in each individual chapter: Chapters 5 and 6 have examined how tearless onions have been created first in the laboratory, and then in the field; Chapter 7 has considered how containment facilities are created as a place for GMO research as a whole. Here I will draw these results together through two discussions. First, I will use my results to redefine the “risks” of GMO research; I will then use this understanding of risk to suggest changes to current risk management practices. Second, I will consider the various tools I have used in the course of my research, drawing from my experiences to redefine how ANT can be used as a theoretical and methodological guide for social science research.

An overarching theme for this discussion chapter is that of “reassembling”. I borrow this term from Latour’s (2005) book Reassembling the social, in which he discusses how ANT can be used to reassemble, or redefine, what we mean by the “social” world. Latour contends that there is no underlying structure to society, and that the role of researchers is to trace the complex

connections and activities that serve to enact it. ANT is a tool for doing just this, as it begins with no predetermined categories or structures that exist as a precursor to activity. In this chapter I will use this concept of reassembling to discuss both risk and ANT itself. Although the use of each of these terms suggests the existence of an underlying structure that determines what they are a priori to activity, they are each enacted in practice and can therefore only be understood in terms of these practices.